Presently, numerous types of networks co-exist in the telecommunications industry, such as Local Area Networks (LANs), Wide Area Networks (WANs), X.25 Networks, Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDNs), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks, and Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) networks. Because of the existence of different networks and standards, there is a need in the telecommunications industry for communication between data processing devices connected to heterogeneous networks. As an example, owners of previously installed LANs frequently want to connect to the emerging broadband ISDN or ATM networks.
Because the performance parameters of these networks continues to increase, there is a need for designing network interfaces to support more functions at the hardware level, since such a hardware design often out performs a design implemented in software. One of these functions being driven to the hardware level is network routing. There are many problems associated with performing routing in hardware. The problem addressed by the present invention is that of efficiently supporting multiple PCI (peripheral component interface) network devices as a wide area connection to a network backbone in a network routing engine.